I just became a victim of theft. Nothing terribly serious, and actually I got my wallet back sans 15,000 =/, so that is all right best beloved, but it was a creepy experience in which I learned many valuable lessons. One being that graphical user interfaces on the web are not designed for developing countries. I know this because in the creepy panic of post-theft, my initial instinct was to cancel all of my credit cards. This means that I have to visit bank websites from Tanzania, which takes bloody forever and a day due to graphical security measures. By forever and a day, I mean Chase's website would sometimes hit a logoff timout before it finished loading. The good news about this is that it would seem to indicate that online identity theft is a problem only of high bandwidth. The bad news is that I have low bandwidth. I began cursing ING for their nice little graphical pin which, in retrospect, is a fairly reasonable response to keyloggers. It does, however, mean that online banking is not really a viable option for developing countries, which is a problem in and of itself.
I also learned that thieves are extremely quiet and that the Peace Corps Safety and Security people are surprisingly sympathetic and helpful even to the trainee who routinely brings a book to all training sessions or falls asleep. Hamna shida darlings, lesson learned on carelessness, and it only cost me about $10 and some peace of mind.
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